Simulations Group Update [Chris Power]

The N-body simulation programme supporting WAVES and more broadly 4MOST galaxy formation and cosmology projects is well under way.

We have 1.5 million CPU hours on the Pawsey supercomputing centre in Perth, WA, to run a suite of simulations of volumes ranging in size from 40 Mpc/h to 1680 Mpc/h on a side, containing up to ~70 billion particles (see table), with sufficient time resolution to capture the growth of the dark matter halo population in detail. The outputs from these simulations are being coupled to the semi-analytic galaxy formation model, GALFORM, to make predictions for the galaxy population as a function of redshift, and we are making light cones available that are tailored to the various requirements of WAVES. By their nature, these are multi wavelength datasets, so we have additional information about the properties of galaxies in HI, X-rays, etc… Efforts in this area will be supplemented later in 2016 by the addition of at least new PhD student to work on improving and extending out light cone modelling and to study how WAVES-wide can be used to place limits on dark matter models.